Video: Creating a head turn: Head shape

One of the ways you can add more life to your character is to create a more realistic head turn. So in this chapter, I am going to show you how to create a dimensional head turn where the features of the character's face actually move across the face and give you the impression that the character has more volume. Let me show you this head turn that we are going to do in this chapter, so that way we have a little bit of reference. So I've just basically added this head turn. So now you can see the eyes, the nose, the mouth all move across the face, and the face itself actually changes shape.

Learn to create and animate highly controllable characters using After Effects. In this course, author George Maestri covers every step on the way, from designing the characters in Photoshop or Illustrator, or drawing them straight from After Effects; assembling characters with hierarchies; making realistic deformations with the Puppet tool; automating rigs with expressions; creating realistic head turns; and showing advanced techniques such as using null objects as bones. Finally, the course shows how to perform a basic animation with the character and ensure the rig works correctly.

Creating a head turn: Head shape

One of the ways you can add more life to your character is to create a morerealistic head turn.So in this chapter, I am going to show you how to create a dimensional head turnwhere the features of the character's face actually move across the face andgive you the impression that the character has more volume.Let me show you this head turn that we are going to do in this chapter, so thatway we have a little bit of reference.So I've just basically added this head turn.So now you can see the eyes, the nose, the mouth all move across the face, andthe face itself actually changes shape.

So now that we understand where we're going, let's go ahead and get started.So I am going to go ahead and just open a project, and in this case we are goingto open the first one in this chapter, which is 06_01. And this is basically thesame character we had before with a few changes;I deleted the blinks and the mouths, and we are going to add those in just alittle bit later, because when you do a head turn like this, the standardreplacement mouths don't quite work, so we are going to have to do another methodif we are going to use this sort of head turn.

But let's go ahead and start.Now the easiest way to do it is to use time remapping, and we can use timeremapping for things other than replacement animation.So in this case, we can use it to smoothly animate between a left, a center, and a right head turn.So let's go through and select everything that we have on the head.So here, I have Mouth 01, and I scroll down, and basically the head goes all theway down to Left and Right Ear.

So basically all of these top layers, from Left and Right Ear, through Head, allthe way up to the Mouth, and this selects everything on the head.Now, just like when we do replacement animation, we're going to create a precomp.I am going to go into Layer > Precompose, and let's just call this HEAD; hit OK.So now I have a composition called HEAD.We can double-click on i, and you can see if I Fit to this,we've got a lot of extra space around it.

So let's go ahead and trim this down.We are going to use Region of Interest, and just draw a box around the character,and maybe zoom in here, and let's go ahead and fine tune this box.I want to make sure I have enough room, not just for the character, but alsofor the head turn. So maybe give him a little bit of room on the sides, but nottoo much; just enough.So that should be good, and once I have that all blocked out, all I have to dois Composition > Crop Comp to Region of Interest.

So now I am going to create the head turn within this.Now, the first thing we need to do is decide how many frames are we going tocreate this head turn over. In other words, how many steps are we going to givethe animator in this head turn.I think a good value is somewhere around 20, and so let's go ahead and do that.So I am going to go into my Composition Settings, and I am going to make myDuration not 20, but 21, and let me show you why: because what that does is it makesthat last frame that we can scroll to 20, then we have 21 at the end there.

So now that I have the proper number of frames, let's go ahead and just animatethe shape of the head.So the first thing I want to do is select all of my parts, and hide them.So I am just going to go and hide all of these layers, and I also want to hidethe Left and Right Ear.So I just want to keep the Head, and we're just going to animate the shape of the head.So we can do that by just using a simple distortion.We can actually put an effect on the head;we are going to go Effect > Distort, and I think Bezier Warp is actually a reallygood one to use for this, because all it does is just put a little box around itthat we can reshape and kind of morph the head.

So the first thing I want to do is make sure that I have a position for the center.So I am going to go to Frame 10, which is the center of my animation, and underBezier Warp, I am going to select all of the controls here, and then just set akeyframe for everything.So now I've got this locked down in a center position.Now all I need to do is create my left and right head shape.So I am going to go all the way down to Frame 0, and let's go ahead into ourBezier Warp, and we are just going to alter the shape.

So I am going to take this corner here, and if you think about it, when the headturns, the chin kind of moves from one side to the other.So I am going to bring the chin out a little bit here, and again, this is justthe shape of the head.We're going to worry about facial features later.So when you take a look at this, you can see how now it's going from the jawstraight at you, to maybe the jaw over here.And let's do the same for the other side.I am going to select that Bezier Warp again, and again I am going to push it inhere to kind of round out where that jaw was, and then just pull out the jaw alittle bit on this side here.

And again, I want to make this pretty symmetrical.So now I've got this.Now this is just a very smooth shape transition, but if I go into my mastercomposition -- let's go ahead and fit this here -- you'll see that my headshape is already there, and I can take this, and just like with replacementanimation, I can do right-click over it, Time > Enable Time Remapping. And when Ido that, all I have to do, again, is just delete that last key, and now what I cando is I can go from Frame 0 to Frame 20, and you can see how it changes shape.

So I am getting a smooth in-between.Now one of the things I am noticing here is that when I get to the very lastframe, it disappears. And we can fix that, because what happens here is when weshrink it down to 21 frames, this is the 21st frame, and there's no bitmap over it.So all I have to do is right-click and drag this over, and we go here;now that last frame won't disappear.In fact, I need to do this for everything in the composition, so in fact, Ishould probably select everything and then just make sure that it's one frameover that end, and that way we won't run into this problem later.

So now we have the basic head shape, but now let's go ahead and go through therest of the head, and start adding in the other components of the head turn.

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